He’d be all right in the morning, clearheaded and able to deal with the situation. Just get through the rest of tonight the best way he could. The worst was already over... almost over.
Wasn’t it?
Except for the porch light, the house was completely dark. So Cassie had gone to bed, too. Even if she was still awake, it would be easy enough to plead exhaustion and go right to sleep.
Dark house, uneventful drive home... he should be feeling better now, safer. Instead he felt... strange. So drained he’d had to open the window, turn the heater off and the radio on to keep himself alert, but inside he was still wired tight. The tingling that had been in his limbs earlier seemed to have passed by some weird osmosis through skin and flesh, become an internal sensation like a steady, low-voltage electrical pulse. He could feel it in his throat, his chest, down low in his belly.
He let himself into the house. No light in the hall; that meant Cassie was angry as well as anxious. The ticking of the grandfather clock seemed overloud to him; the odors of cooked meat, furniture polish, air freshener, Cassie’s perfume were strong in his nostrils. As if his senses had become heightened somehow. He took the stairs in an old man’s climb, one riser at a time. Paused in front of Angela’s door, resisted the urge to look in on her and Kenny, and moved ahead to the open door to his bedroom.
Cassie was a motionless blob of shadow on her side of the bed. He could hear her breathing and knew from the cadence that she was awake. Not ready to talk to him yet, though; she lay silent as he crossed to the bathroom.
He shut the door, turned on the light. The strange feeling had grown even more pronounced; the inner tingling was urgent, as if any second now his hands, his body would start to twitch and jerk. He imagined himself in a kind of uncontrollable fit, beginning to foam at the mouth; the image, gone in two or three seconds, left him cold all over. He stripped naked, threw his clothes into the hamper, turned on the hot water in the shower. The thought came to him then, standing there next to the toilet, that he hadn’t had to urinate since he’d stopped on the road into the Paloma Mountains after the incident with the cop. Nearly five hours up there, the drive home, even now standing here... no pressure at all.
In the shower, under a stream as hot as he could stand it, he scrubbed himself with a thick lather. Hands, face, arms, underarms, upper body. The soapy washcloth took away the last of the sweat-stink, but he didn’t feel clean. And now his skin seemed too tight, sensitive to the touch, prickly on the surface again — sensations that had nothing to do with the steamy water.
He kept scrubbing with the cloth, working downward across his abdomen. The instant it touched his privates, the inner tingling became something else — a carnal heat that flared the way a torch ignites. His erection seemed to leap up all at once, sprong! Like Dan Quayle’s anatomically correct doll in Doonesbury. He stood staring down at himself in disbelief. Weeks of virtual impotence, and tonight, after all that had happened, all the nightmarish things he’d done this day... a massive hard-on, sudden and unbidden. As though the acts had temporarily, perversely repaired him: bladder, prostate, sexual apparatus.
It disgusted him and at the same time he was more excited than he’d been since his first sexual experience in high school. A great, screaming urgency that was need and fear and self-loathing and a clutch of other emotions all mixed up together, his phallus so high-jutting and engorged it was like something that had attached itself to his body, a parasitic entity, rather than an extension of himself.
No! he thought. He shut off the water, stepped out, and dried off savagely, punishing his body with the towel. The erection would not diminish, the urgency remained like a consuming fire. It shut down his thoughts, engulfed his will to resist, left him with nothing but the clamant heat.
He shut off the light, padded out into the dark bedroom. Cassie stirred as he approached, started to sit up, and he heard himself say, “No, don’t put on the light.” His tone more than the words caused her to lie still. He drew the bedclothes back and slid in beside her, whispered her name, moved to fit his body against hers. Heard her suck in her breath when she felt him like iron against her thigh.
“Jack, what...?”
“I need you,” he said in somebody else’s voice, “please, baby, I can’t... I need... it’s been so long...”
She lay stiffly while his fingers fumbled with buttons, groped inside her pajama top to encircle her breast. “What is it, what’s happened?”
“Nothing’s happened.”
“Why’re you so late? Why are you like this?”
“I just need you... please Cass please...”
She yielded to him, not gradually but all at once, turning her body against his, her nipple hardening under his palm, her hand stroking down between their bodies to grip and guide him. She gasped as he filled her, clutched him tight with her hands, arms, legs, began to move with him in all the practiced rhythm of twenty-six years of lovemaking. But it was nothing at all like it had ever been before — not slow and tender, no murmured endearments. It was fierce, fast, insistent, an almost desperate coupling punctuated by pants and groans, Cassie’s as well as his, fast fast until he came with a crying moan that she managed to half stifle with her mouth, a climax as intense as a backdraft in a burning building, as if he were ejaculating jets of fire. When it ended it left him burned out inside, an empty hulk that collapsed against her. She neither moved nor let go of him, clinging just as fervently until his pulse rate began to slow down. The embrace was all hers; he no longer had the strength to return it.
He knew she was waiting for him to speak first and he groped for words. The only ones he found were “I love you. I love you so much,” in a frog’s croak.
“I know you do.”
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it, I—”
“Don’t be sorry for that. I needed you too.”
Gently she disengaged herself and sat up. He sensed she was going to switch on her bedside lamp and he lay with his eyes shut. He could almost feel the sudden radiance against his lids, her gaze probing his face. But there was nothing there for her to see, nothing left inside him to show through.
“Talk to me,” she said. “If something did happen—”
“Nothing happened.”
“Then why are you so late? Jack... did you really go to Paloma to see Nick Jackson?”
“I told you I did.”
“Not the city... Rakubian...”
“No. Of course not.”
“I was so worried. I thought—”
“You thought what?” Hollis opened his eyes and sat up weakly, blinking, to face her. “I didn’t confront or harm that psycho, if that’s what’s bothering you. Do you want me to swear it? All right, I swear it on Angela’s life, Kenny’s life.”
She believed him because she wanted to believe. She said, “Do you blame me for worrying, thinking the worst? First Eric disappeared, all upset, and then you do the same thing...”
“No,” he said, “I don’t blame you.”
“Where have you been? Why didn’t you call?”
“Dinner lasted longer than I expected. Afterward... I just felt depressed. Angela leaving, that business with Eric today, Rakubian. I needed to be alone. I went to a movie, drove around for a while afterward... avoided coming home, as lousy as that sounds.”
The lies rolled out glibly; oh, he was becoming a fine goddamn liar. Cassie believed them, too. She said, “I understand, but you still should have called.”
“I know it. I’m sorry.”
“Didn’t you think about Rakubian? That he might show up here again, do God knows what?”
“He didn’t, did he? Show up or call or anything?”